Monday Updates on the Spill

It's a spectacular May day in Montreal and coincidently sunlight appears to be breaking through the MSM too. At least so far as the BP gusher in the Gulf story is conncerned.

Last night on CBS's 60 Minutes, in the best tradition of this program, they dug into all aspects of the spew, reporting that approximately a Valdez worth of oil has been gushing in the Gulf waters each week since the April 20 explosion, and a lot of people got to hear for perhaps the first time the extent of the failures, greed and hubris that led to this collossal disaster. An example of the carelessness as reported last night:

...in a drilling accident four weeks before the explosion, the critical rubber gasket, called an "annular," was damaged and pieces of it started coming out of the well. "According to Williams, when parts of the annular start coming up on the deck someone from Transocean says, ‘Look, don't worry about it.'

Here's why that's so important: the annular is used to seal the well for pressure tests. And those tests determine whether dangerous gas is seeping in.

So there you have damage to a crucial instrument for monitoring gas pressure from below being dismissed as unimportant. Watch for yourself:

Lot's more news today concerning all of this, starting with Obama sending a crack team of scientists and enngineers to the Gulf to see if they can succeed where BP has failed. An explanation of why the natural gas pouring into the Gulf is equally and perhaps even a larger long term problem to the environment.

Unbelievably in the face of all this here's the corporate shills of the Republican party arguing that everyone should just trust BP to pay what it owes for the cleanup and damages inflicted on the environment and people's livelihoods. Just like you should trust BP to do the right thing about its use of dispersants in the Gulf - they're employing according to EPA data, Corexit and it ranks far above dispersants made by competitors in toxicity and far below them in effectiveness in handling southern Louisiana crude.